Manuela Pallotto Strickland, Under a Starry Vault
transformation of Jung himself into the lion-headed mithraic divinity, a narrative construct which shows an exceptionally syncretic quality, bearing Pagan, Gnostic and Christian attributes at once[1]. According to Jung, the self-deification process was to be read exclusively as a psychological phenomenon, rather than as a metamorphosis into a divine being. It was the result of the successful integration of the ego and the unconscious into the archetypal image of the Godhead. Precisely on this basis, it could be argued that by understanding the symbolical phenomenon of the divine as a psychological fact, and by acknowledging the actuality of the divine on a solely psychological ground, Jung had in fact made his strongest contribution to the dreaded modern secularization. In a way, precisely because modern spirituality was already orbiting without the sphere of religious belief, Jung could ease religion towards the all too human sphere of the psyche. As he himself acknowledged, belief had already lost any relevance to modern man. Insofar as religious experience could still be considered as an experience of the numinous capable of bridging the gap between consciousness and the unconscious, it had to be moved from the realm of belief to the realm of knowledge, of gnosis – the knowledge of the Godhead being the knowledge of the self as a whole. Colored by more than a neoplatonic shade, the journey into the unconscious pursued by analytical psychology aimed at recovering this hidden and mysterious knowledge (hidden to consciousness and mysterious to rationality), which lived its eternal life in oneiric archetypal symbolism.
If dreams were to be considered the offspring of the unconscious estranged to
consciousness, rich in archetypal elements yet alien to the ego, then Jung's goal was to
bring consciousness in turn to dreaming. Unconscious contents had to be stirred up
consciously, exercising what Jung called «active imagination»[2]. Although such an
imagination wasn't conceived as a passive experience, a certain receptiveness to the
unconscious and the capacity to speak its ancient and universal language, the ability to
recognize different archetypal forms and to summon them to consciousness, were the
faculties to develop and cultivate – at least by the analytical psychologist. Thus, to the
reader of Symbols and Transformations of Libido, the colorful and heterogeneous range
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© Firenze University Press • Aisthesis • 2/2015 • www.fupress.com/aisthesis • ISSN 2035-8466
